


Kleinigkeit

by zoldnoveny



Category: Death Note (Anime & Manga)
Genre: But like it’s only mentioned briefly, Drug Use, Established Relationship, Jewish Matt, M/M, Music
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-20
Updated: 2019-02-20
Packaged: 2019-11-01 11:22:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17866325
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zoldnoveny/pseuds/zoldnoveny
Summary: Matt thought that living as Mello would be like adding another level of intensity to the color spectrum. The world would be saturated in vibrancy, everything bright and fierce. Matt, opposingly, much preferred things washed over in gold - blending together into ambiguity beyond the lenses of his goggles. He didn’t feel strongly about hardly anything, and certainly not the way Mello did. He liked the stuff he liked, but it seemed more than that to Mello. He wasn’t sure. Thinking too hard about it made his head hurt.





	Kleinigkeit

“It’s about raw emotion!” Mello told him, shouting over the blaring music, hands thrusted out before him as he shook his fists for emphasis.   
  
Either it was turned up so loud the room was shaking, or Matt was so high the universe was beginning to undulate. Either seemed plausible.   
  
Mello was suddenly crawling onto the bed, hands and knees, coming towards where Matt sat in the against the headboard. “What’s it make you _feel_ , Matty?” He asked, face inches away from Matt’s, all wild blue eyes masked behind a curtain of mussed blonde. He looked crazy, but Matt digged it.   
  
Mello had told him what song this was and whose genius had cooked it up, but Matt couldn’t remember. He’d always found it funny that Mello liked classical music. Not the soft, whimsical kind - only loud, quick crashing like this. Dozens of instruments all clanging and competing to be heard, almost angry. Mello made it angry, at least. He liked this and screaming grungy punk stuff for the same reason - he could get mad and bang his head around and yell along with it, whether there were words or not. It was funny, because Mello needed no help getting mad, but always took it.   
  
“Bored,” Matt finally answered. His eyes kept focusing on the minute details of Mello’s face - the thin lashes beneath his eyes, the cracking off his chapped lips, the line of scar tissue brushing over the bridge of his nose, the sharpness of his cheekbones, his dilated pupils beyond the redness of his eyes. The music seemed to fade into the background with Mello all up in Matt’s face. It was hard to concentrate on two things at once, felt like, and it was impossible to tear his attention away from Mello with him this close up.   
  
“No it doesn’t,” Mello sat back on his heels, still leaning over Matt’s side. His hands pulled through his hair, head tipped back, line of his throat clearly cut against the dark backdrop of the room. Suddenly, he was climbing into Matt’s lap, leather thighs encasing Matt’s hips. His hands were on Matt’s chest, silver rings and chipping black nail polish. “You’re just not reaching deep enough. Don’t be so superficial.”   
  
Mello always got extra intense when he was high.   
  
“Don’t you want to get in a fight? Set something on fire?”

  
“You’re fucking insane.” Matt laid an arm over his eyes, pressing his face into the inside of his elbow.   
  
The music swelled, anything fine or precise drowning in the multitudes, screeching violins and rumbling horns, pounding percussion, trilling piano. Matt really had no clue what was happening, just that it was all loud and wild and chaotic. It fit Mello well, so it made sense that he liked it so much.   
  
“This is how God speaks to us,” Mello was saying, then. “Through art, through feeling. Those who think measly human language could encapsulate his message are brainless. It says nothing with words but you feel it, don’t you? It conveys something. How do we know how to feel, Matt? What is it within us telling us to feel this way? It’s just sounds, isn’t it? A bunch of sounds all together, all at once. Why do we find any merit in that? What else is there besides God telling us to?”   
  
Religious Mello was a hidden Mello. He was always there, lingering beyond the surface, an eternal driving force. It took something specific to bring him out - Mello wore his rosary and donned himself in crosses, but Matt always assumed that was more for the aesthetics than anything. This side of himself was one he’d tried to abandon, but always came back.   
  
“I don’t think it’s that deep, man.” Matt told his elbow.   
  
Mello picked up his arm and tugged it away, getting back up in Matt’s face. Their noses touched. “What is depth? Looking past the veil godless society casts down on us to keep us satiated and stupid?”   
  
It made sense for religious Mello to be the brother of angry Mello. Part of the reason Matt thought Mello was attracted to God was because God could be all-powerful and divine through his righteous anger, his harsh judgement. Matt used to joke that Mello would make a better Jew than anything, because that was the first testament before Jesus came along and made everything nice.   
  
Matt never really cared much about his own religion. There wasn’t much to care about, anyway. The few years he lived with his parents, they were majorly non-practicing. For important holidays they busted out the Seder plates, but that was about it. And when your drug addict mother gets drunk and starts crying to you about how God isn’t real, and you’re five years old, that leaves a dent on your faith.   
  
But no matter what the world whirled at Mello, he never stopped believing. There was something kinda nice about that.   
  
“How long does this damn song go on, anyways?” Matt veered away from that subject. He was never ready to engage in analytical religious discussion, but especially not while high.   
  
“Not much more.” Mello told him. Something dark began to accumulate in his eyes. Leaning on his elbows, which sat evenly at either side of Matt’s head, he lowered himself so his the ends of his hair brushed up against Matt’s cheeks and his breath fanned over Matt’s lips. His eyes tore a pathway down Matt’s face, somehow calculating even in their haziness.   
  
When he finally kissed him, the touch was an anchor. Matt hadn’t realized he’d begun to float away until Mello tethered him back to earth. So he threw an arm around his shoulders, settled a palm over the nape of his neck, touched his opposite fingertips to the convex of his ribs. Let Mello lick into his mouth, filled the gaps between his lips with his own, swallowed up his hot breath and drifted off somewhere entirely new.   
  
They rolled around and made out for a while, aimless and sloppy, and Matt thought he would be fine with staying like that forever.   
  
Soon enough, their mouths parted. Matt rolled onto his back to stare up at the ceiling, and Mello had his head on his stomach, doing the same. The playlist continued to run, switching from punk-rock to Mozart to bitchy pop without premise. Mello got extra into some of the songs, and would start moving his head and singing along. Besides that, everything was still.   
  
Until Mello crawled up the length of Matt’s torso and laid his head in the crook of his neck, profile against his throat, a hand curling over Matt’s heart. He was so warm it felt like a fire was blazing under his skin. The song playing now was not English, but Mello drawled along with the lyrics with as much ease as ever. In the back of Matt’s mind, subconsciously, he understood, but he wouldn’t have been able to translate the words back into anything coherent.

Honestly, it was kind of charming how much Mello liked music. He did nothing passively - everything was always cranked up to extremes. The music he enjoyed was, well, like he’d said: _raw emotion_ and _how God communicates to us_. Never just a song he so happened to enjoy. It was such a Mello thing.

Matt thought that living as Mello would be like adding another level of intensity to the color spectrum. The world would be saturated in vibrancy, everything bright and fierce. Matt, opposingly, much preferred things washed over in gold - blending together into ambiguity beyond the lenses of his goggles. He didn’t feel strongly about hardly anything, and certainly not the way Mello did. He liked the stuff he liked, but it seemed more than that to Mello. He wasn’t sure. Thinking too hard about it made his head hurt.

The song bled out to its end, and Matt thought to say, “I liked that one.”

Mello hummed. “Of course you do. I have impeccable taste.”

Matt laughed.

Fair enough.

**Author's Note:**

> the title of this is based off the non-English song they’re listening to, which is ,,diese Kleinigkeit” by die goldenen zitronen... although it doesn’t fit with Mello’s tastes bc it’s kinda slow lmao. thanks for reading!


End file.
